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The Stranger

Q: Your new novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” ascended to No. 1 on the Barnes & Noble best-seller list virtually the moment it was published in this country. What do you make of that? Now perhaps I can quit my job. Three days a week, I do some consulting for a little branding firm in London.

Is it fair to describe your second novel as a Muslim’s critique of American values? That’s oversimplifying. The novel is a love song to America as much as it is a critique.

I didn’t find it so loving. It takes place on a single evening at a cafe in Lahore, as a charming, well-educated Pakistani in his 20s recounts his life story to an unnamed American stranger, who seems suspicious of him. The American is acting as if the Pakistani man is a Muslim fundamentalist because of how he looks — he has a beard.

And the Pakistani man also brings certain fears and preconceptions to their conversation. In an act of reverse ethnic profiling, he suspects the American is an undercover agent who might arrest him. Yes. But he could be just as freaked out as the rest of us are in this world when we see an American with that kind of build and imagine he is a C.I.A. agent. The novel is not supposed to have a correct answer. It’s a mirror. It really is just a conversation, and different people will read it in different ways.

Like your novel, this interview is a conversation between an American listener and a Pakistani man with a beard. Are we also doomed to misunderstanding? Do you think I’m a C.I.A. agent? If you had short hair and a bulge in your jacket, I might assume you were.

Do you think I am mistaking you for a fundamentalist? I don’t know. But you are doing me the honor of trying to understand me.

I don’t know if I trust you. Put that into the piece!

It was unsettling to learn that your protagonist felt a rush of genuine pleasure when the World Trade towers were attacked. Some part of him has a desire to see America harmed. In much of the world, there is resentment toward America, and the notion that the superpower could be humiliated or humbled or damaged in this way is something that gives satisfaction.

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Is that how you felt when the towers were attacked? No. I was devastated. A wall had suddenly come up between my American and Muslim worlds. The novel is my attempt to reconnect those divided worlds.

Much like the narrator of your book, you grew up in Pakistan and were educated at Princeton. I was one of two or three Pakistanis in the class of ’93, and I didn’t feel homesick for a second. I took two writing workshops with Joyce Carol Oates, and I wrote the first draft of my first novel in a long-fiction workshop with Toni Morrison, both of whom encouraged me.

Nonetheless, you went off to law school. What were you thinking? I went to Harvard Law School and decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. It bored the pants off of me.

Your novel suggests you have read a lot of Camus, particularly “The Fall,” whose protagonist, not unlike yours, pours out his story to a stranger in one long philosophical rant. Yes, Camus taught me how to have a conversation that implicates the reader.

In your novel, the Pakistani man is the sole speaker. Why did you choose to silence the American? For me, in the world of media, particularly the American media, it’s almost always the other way around.

But no one is silencing you. To the contrary, you’re scheduled to visit Miami and Cambridge and Washington this week to promote a novel of which there are already more than 100,000 copies out there. But there are not many of us from the Muslim world who are getting heard over here. And the ones who are mostly seem to be speaking in grainy videos from caves.